


That Which This Way Walks

by joannabelle



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Eregion, M/M, Silverfisting, Sucks to be Celebrimbor, angbang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 08:33:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4131171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joannabelle/pseuds/joannabelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the War of Wrath, Sauron finds himself haunted by the memory of his old Master.  Unfortunately for him, poor Celebrimbor pays the price.</p><p>Silverfisting, with a sour dose of grieving Angbang.  Seriously, Sauron – it’s been like six hundred years.  Get over it already.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Which This Way Walks

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own these characters.
> 
> Warnings: Umm major character death, torture (mild), poor Celebrimbor basically gets shat on, but hey that's pretty much canon so you know what's coming.
> 
> Notes: Some liberties have been taken with the canon of the timelines, so please be aware it is not a strict adherence. Oh, that plus the buttsex, I guess (that DIDN’T happen?).

* * *

  


Mairon is awash; and the walls are growing whiskers.  
  
A thick spread of decay sinks along the stone at his feet, like the dried tear tracks that once creased in streaks along his collar.  
  
He is surrounded by efflorescence. Around him everywhere he turns, spread in rubble across the land, the walls are growing whiskers; and they sink across the stone.  
  
He wrings his hands.  
  
It is such a _bitter_ reminder – this sagging memory that now salves itself across the very granite that had once made up the mighty walls of Angband. In crusting lines of salt they whisper to him of his Master’s collapse, a susurrous hiss of cobwebbed streaks baked in pallid grey.  
  
He stands alone, amongst the stretching field of ruins.  It had been four hundred years and yet still he visits the site, wistful for its taste.  
  
The whitewashed chatter of distant birds chalks at the edges of his vision, a sound barely heard but ever-present, skittering just out of sight over the hills.  The trees they had once gouged from the ground so long ago – together dark Lord and Lieutenant, a twisted mix of wrath and spite – persist still, new stalks of green breaking through the clay-like crumbling of the earth. He wonders (too often, sometimes) if it is Yavanna herself trying to send him a message – a taunt of that of which he has escaped, where the ground was bladed green and the flurried trill of the birds had squalled against his ears.  
  
But here the ruins are empty. But here the ruins are now steeped in death, as the ancient bones of forgotten Orcs crunch below his feet.  
  
But _here_ , the world is silent – all but for the chatter of the birds, and the faint hum that slinks underneath his skin.  
  
And for a minute, an hour, a day – Mairon has not a moment’s ponder.  
  
But instead he stoops upon his haunches, a lone wolf sat atop a hill.  And watches the whiskers as they crack in salted trails along the stone.  
  


* * *

  
He chooses the next morning to begin toward the planes of Eregion.  
  
He takes on a fair form.  
  


* * *

  
Celebrimbor’s cheeks are pale and his jaw is set – and in his eyes Mairon can see the flickers of a flame.  
  
He is of the line of Feänor; this Mairon has no doubt.  
  
Upon their first day in court, Annatar suffers the weary gazes of a batter of dark-haired elves. Their gaze is piercing, unsettled, and raw, and Annatar bites the inside of his cheek to quell the insane urge to grin.  He catches sight of himself in passing, upon a small circular mirror curved upon the wooden wall of the steps leading up to the dais.  The frame of the glass is carved in loops redolent of Yavanna’s favourite crop of bindweeds – and though the scene should pull complete with the bite of nostalgia Mairon is struck, instead, by the sight of his own face.   
  
_Chatoyant_ , Melkor used to call them, the slitted glimmer of his eyes – but what stares back at him now is a dull, grey-washed blue.  
  
He feels plain, despite the chiselled cutting of his jaw and the long legs with which he strides ascent the stairs. Something of him has been lost in the transformation, hidden deep in the slanting of his irises. And, in the looping of the petals along the frame and the glossy sheen upon the glass, he finds that he is lost.  
  
The disguise works exactly as he had anticipated.  
  


* * *

  
Tyelpë tells him of many things, as they work alone together amongst the fires of the forge.  
  
Tells him of the Lady of Light, and the beating burn of his father’s disapproval.  Tells him of the white-washed stone of Ost-in-Edhil’s palace walls.  
  
Annatar listens as he strikes new dents along a heated pole of steel.  The blade is red hot as it glows, a burning stab that splinters light upon the pewter of the bench.  
  
He has bid his time, and during the process tempered steel.  The Elf has opened to him.  
  
Annatar is not blind to the gazes the Noldo pierces through his flesh from behind as he turns his head to work. Nor of the pungent stench of quelled arousal which floats upon the ashes of the flames and fans down the corridors outskirting the room.  
  
He is sure the Elf does not smell it; but the taste lingers upon Annatar’s tongue as strong as if he had bent down to lick his way up Tyelpë’s thigh.   
  
It is a heady smell, one that burns at his tongue – and it makes him think of older things: the way Melkor’s hands would glide down his back, of scratches that very nearly drew blood.  
  
Over the hammering of the metal, Annatar ties the strings of a new strategy together inside his mind.  
  


* * *

  
And here still his Master had plundered his way into Annatar’s very heart.   
  
For it is of Melkor he thinks as he spreads Tyelpë’s thighs the first time and presses his way inside. And it is of Melkor he thinks in the time and time after that.  
  
Until the twigs snag and his memories twist and the familiar scent of the elf gets mixed into the heavy memory of Melkor’s breath, and Annatar finds himself remembering the way that Tyelpë shudders in bursts around him and the way that the elf moans his name in a reverence he has never before heard, and how the sound begins to taint the memories of Melkor’s long and scraping claws.  
  
And it is under Tyelpë’s twitching beguile that Annatar comes in a scorching flurry of heat that peels at the insides of his stomach and tracks forgotten tears down his cheeks, as he buries his face into the sodden elf’s back.  
  
They lie together, panting in quiet gusts, as bent over the spoiled workbench of Celebrimbor’s study Annatar spreads his hands through a crinkle of folded parchments that lie across the wood. The bisque of the leaves sticks to his palms.  
  
Tyelpë agrees to the plan, and they set about to work upon what will be Annatar’s greatest achievement to date.  
  
This too, he expects, shall end in pieces. He is most prepared.  
  


* * *

  
When this ends, Annatar decides, he will gut the elf upon a stake.  
  


* * *

  
And yet part of him wonders – in those stray moments between a breath, as he stands across the bench from the Noldor elf, watching as Tyelpë’s eyes sway after the rocking of the hammer – whether this might be the _key_. The piece that gives him back his breath, and stops the salt from tracking lines into his palms.  
  
Ten rings glow white upon the pewter workbench between them, a sparkling selection of emerald ruby jade. They glitter together in a golden platinum taint, ten power-hung trinkets of prized Noldorian design.  
  
For Annatar is sure now that there is something burrowed deep under his skin, a black and murmurous threading lace that has knotted its way along his tendons, and poisoning the colour of his tongue.  There is in him now the sound of a sick and twisted _tune_ ; a song that singes at his fingertips, and winds between his hairs.  
  
And he can feel it as it bleeds an echoed murmur inside his bones – there is a whisper there, never loud enough to hear, and in it he can taste his Master’s voice – as the loud clanging of Tyelpë’s hammer splinters across the stone.  
  
And in one impulsive stretch (over the hammer, and over the bursts of molten scintillating gold that shatters in sparks through the dark, pungent air) Annatar drags his fingertips down the side of his right cheek.   
  
Under the pointed cut of his nails he draws three thin lines of blood.  And where he waits in anticipation for the pain, Annatar feels instead an empty, _aching_ numbness and a light wet trickle down his neck.  
  


* * *

  
The fire turns blue as Celebrimbor beats the final dent into the gold, and Annatar’s fingers twitch in a sickened and greedy lust.  
  
With the smouldering flame inside his eyes, glossed in a new proud bright amber hue, the elf spins strikingly around to send Annatar a laugh –  
  


* * *

  
And there is magma surrounding him. As in a thick glow of russet gold the heat hisses over the raw-bitten splits that bend across his lips; Sauron stands inside the craters of Mount Doom.  
  
The elf’s smile is but a memory.  
  
And around him here the magma bubbles – yet Sauron sees not the whiskers of an old and crumbled ruin, but a _sea_ of shining cats-eyes that hang suspended upon the film.  
  
A white-washed gem glints in diamond around his neck, as for the first time after years, Mairon slips upon the Ring.  
  


* * *

  
The next smile Tyelpë throws at him is _wild_.  
  


* * *

  
And as Celebrimbor’s eyes begin to water, in a trickling mess of iodine that drags down the splotches of his cheeks, Sauron finally realises how _utterly_ sick he is of tears.  
  
It is in a jolt of white-hot fury with which he takes the bar inside his hand and in a clicking of iron-wrought gears, wrenches Tyelpë’s arms further apart.  He can see the taught stretch of the muscles in the elf’s long legs, as he forces forth the suspension that spreads Tyelpë against the wall.  
  
The room around them _trembles_ , as from afar, down the winding twists of Ost-in-Edhil’s hall, flow the bursts and shouts of a town overrun by siege.  
  
“You must simply tell me where they are, Tyelpë,” (Sauron, Mairon–) _Annatar_ breaths over the sound, and his words gust deliberate and slow. He allows them to brush up against the sensitive tip of Tyelpë’s right ear, his lips touched lightly to the skin: “For I will find them … with you, or without.”  
  
From outside the hall, there stabs a shriek.  The walls around them are crumbling; dark whispers hang upon the air.  
  
“Please do not make me wrench them from your bloody, dead lips.  For I still so much enjoy them, and would opt to see you free.”  
  
Yet Tyelpë does not move, and Sauron lacks the blessings of a patience.  
  
With a feigned indifference, then (for he ignores the burning inside his palms, and the sound of Tyelpë’s breath as it pants against his ears), Sauron twists a thin knife under the elf’s right clavicle – and he clenches against the screech, as droplets of salt splinter down the sarcoline mottle of Tyelpë’s skin to soak into the wound.  
  
The elf sobs in earnest; and Sauron decides he _loathes_ the sound – and with his ears ringing from the dark beatings of a tune, he twists the blade further.  
  


* * *

  
Their final battle comes not in the clashing of the battalion, but instead in the release of five brown-tipped arrows.  
  
The first one strikes Tyelpë in the arm. Or what is left of it, anyway; for the elf now hangs under the sun, tied upon a wooden pole.  
  
Upon Sauron’s index finger the Ring glints in a flame under the sunlight, a bespeckled twist of gold that curls around the darkened pallor of his skin.   
  
The whispers of Melkor’s turbid tongue wash wet against his nape.  For Sauron can _hear_ him now – can hear the words of that foul tune that snakes along the curve of his bones and carves out of his fingers.   
  
And no matter how many shattered faces he sees in the rubble, nor how far the salted stretch of tears sink down along his cheeks – that shadow looms ever closer to press against his back. But in place of ash and malted spice and Melkor’s long and thickened claws, the words taste, instead, strangely like the burning chatoyance of Mairon’s eyes.  
  
For somewhere between the piercing puncture of three wooden arrows, Sauron comes to understand that this tune stems not from Melkor; but instead, rips forth from _him_.  
  
And as the fifth arrow breaks Tyelpë through the chest, and the elf’s head drops upon his collar, hung limp upon the stake; Sauron closes his eyes, and slackens – and feels a frantic, empty ache.  
  



End file.
